DOE Awards Woodruff Scientific A Phase II Small Business Innovation Research Grant

Woodruff Scientific, a Santa Fe-based technology company, has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the US Department of Energy Office of Fusion Energy Sciences. The award will support the technical development of a collaborative Virtual Reality (VR) Data Visualization Platform, as a means for scientists located in different parts of the world, to interact with their data in a virtual environment. The platform is being developed in partnership with Intel, Kitware, the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy.

As High Performance Computing and Scientific Computing Researchers advance towards Exascale Computing, improved techniques will be needed to visualize the massive amounts of data available. The collaborative VR Data Visualization Tool, SUMMITVR, aims to enable insights not possible with current data visualization workflows by immersing the user within their 3D dataset. Very often those insights need to be communicated with remote collaborators: SUMMITVR brings researchers into a virtual environment, such as a fusion reactor, to experience, share, process and communicate their data to scale and in context. Tools are available within the platform to perform workflow functions, such as isosurface selection and slicing. SUMMITVR utilizes commercially-available Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) such as the HTC Vive and can work alongside existing analysis software already present in researcher’s workflows.

“Conveying data insights is often problematic, especially when datasets are large,” said Dr. Simon Woodruff, CEO of SciVista. “Our collaborative VR data visualization platform is designed to address sourcing, sharing, analysis and visualization of large, complex datasets generated in experiments and by advanced simulations, such as those generated in the pursuit of nuclear fusion as an energy source.”

SUMMITVR will be marketed and sold under SciVista (a New Mexico C-corp, established in 2018, and a spin-out from Woodruff Scientific) which is dedicated to the development of custom data visualization platforms for decision-makers in research, government and private enterprise.